Throughout the week, we discussed the problem of pernicious governmental, corporate and other top-down secrecy involved in globalization that enables large-scale wrongdoing and keeps citizens in the dark about it, making effective solutions and real democracy, and even our collective security, impossible.

Some foes of mass surveillance have been celebrating the final passage of the USA Freedom Act, but Thomas Drake sounds decidedly glum. The new law, he tells me, is "a new spy program." It restarts some of the worst aspects of the Patriot Act.

While Daniel Ellsberg, his compatriot and companion in revelation, remains a major figure for his role in releasing the Pentagon Papers, Tony Russo is a forgotten man. That's too bad. He shouldn't be forgotten. His is, unfortunately, a story of our times as well as his.

With its omnipresent surveillance, the U.S. government began aggressively targeting and prosecuting whistleblowers and other sources, putting renowned journalists and publishers worldwide directly or incidentally in their surveillance crosshairs.

Over the next few weeks at the United Nations the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference will be in session, and the central question is will it go down in history as another lost opportunity or the dramatic turning point that millions of people around the world are hoping for?

The Johnson administration was looking for a pretext to escalate the war. "We don't know what happened," National Security Adviser Walter W. Rostow told the president after Congress passed the resolution, "but it had the desired result."

I had a great epiphany on the train last week which was that I'm beginning to see hacking not merely as cracking codes, or as Richard Stallman says "playful cleverness", but as man's will to deconstruct things in order to rebuild them into something better.

This is part one of my three-day diary on filming my currently untitled history of hacking documentary at the Hackers On Planet Earth X (HOPE X) Convention hosted by the legendary 2600 Hacker Quarterly.

In forty years perhaps the WikiLeaks cables will be declassified and heralded in the same way that the Pentagon Papers were a few years ago. And by then, the investigation into WikiLeaks will be seen as the selective political assault that it is.

Charging that the administration has launched "an assault on freedom of the press," a new petition tells Obama and Holder: "We urge you in the strongest terms to halt all legal action against Mr. Risen and to safeguard the freedom of journalists to maintain the confidentiality of their sources."

I have tended to see whistleblowers as courageous individuals performing an often useful function, but also as slightly crazy vigilantes who were participating in that conspiracy against confidentiality, and thus against privacy.

Most of those making the case that Snowden should "return to the United States and face the music in a court of law" regularly offer up (as an example for how whistleblowers should act) the story of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. But a better parallel exists.

Snowden, in a larger sense, in a good way, doesn't matter as a person. What matters is what he has revealed to us about a national security state that has clearly gone quite insane, violating our liberty and our freedom to live without unwarranted search and seizure of our private lives.